


no smoking - no naked flame

by river_of_words



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Gallifrey, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Episode: s12e02 Spyfall Part 2, Resentment, gallifrey grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:14:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25067497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/river_of_words/pseuds/river_of_words
Summary: Danger: Highly flammable
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 18
Kudos: 56





	no smoking - no naked flame

The first time she names Gallifrey with this mouth, her tongue is still coated with its ashes and her audience is oblivious to the glory of the world she’s just thrown up before them. The most advanced civilisation in the universe, the most powerful, the most imperious, that’s where _she’s_ from. Don’t they understand? That’s her heritage! She’d refused that heritage, rejected it, betrayed its values. But home worms its roots through you without warning or consent. By the time you realise how deep it goes, it’s too late. You’ll tear yourself apart trying to pull it out. Home will not leave you nor let you leave. She would know.

* * *

They stare at her with blank eyes and anger fills her stomach like accelerant. They’d pulled the words from her by force and now wouldn’t honour them. Wouldn’t give Gallifrey the deference it demands. Wouldn’t bow in trembling awe before the Timelords.

Pawing at the memories she’d been guarding until she, exhausted, had let them peek, now they couldn’t even recognise their significance.

They can’t, because they don’t know what those words mean. Because she hasn’t told them. Because she has hid herself from them. Hid her grandiosity, her orange blood, her alien morality. Hid her sharp eyes, sharp teeth, sharp edges. Washed her bloodied hands. Your friendly neighbourhood alien. Human-safe.

Isn’t this just the kind of joke the universe would play on her, that after centuries of trying, when she finally manages to distance herself from the Timelords, she needs to be acknowledged as one. Seen as one. Understood as one. As the last one.

She’s standing right in front of them, the infamy of her legacy behind her in blazing burnt orange, and they can’t see her for what she is, who she is, or where she comes from.

She wants to take the words back from them, out of their heads, pull them close to her chest awaiting someone to inflict them on who will appreciate their majesty.

It’s only for a second that she considers it.

She doesn’t do it, of course.

Of course.

* * *

She doesn’t want to resent them for wresting this admission from her. For knowing without understanding. For asking about things they have no concept of. For wanting knowledge they have no right to. For not letting her wriggle out with a half-believable anecdote and a distracting emergency. For not playing by her rules. For not letting her pretend. For being oblivious to how impossible they’ve made it for her to pretend.

She doesn’t _want_ to resent them.

* * *

They’ve just left Orphan 55 and they’re devastated.

She wants to tell them it’s not that bad. (She knows that isn’t fair.)

She wants to tell them at least they didn’t singlehandedly lay their planet in ashes. (She knows this isn’t fair either.)

She wants to retaliate against Yaz’s accusatory tone, tell her that _she_ _hadn’t done anything wrong_. (This wasn’t _her_ fault! It wasn’t even her fault this time!)

She wants to yell she was just trying to protect them from knowledge they can’t unknow and a weight they will have to bear. (That gets heavier with every passing century.)

She wants to shout not to look to her for comfort because she’s got none left in her. (Only flames.)

She wants to scream that they should be comforting _her_. (Because it isn’t fair!)

She wants to scream. (IT ISN’T FAIR.)

She puts compassion she doesn’t feel in her eyes and hope she struggles to believe in in her voice, pretends the fire that is home, wormed its way into her bones, is not setting her ablaze from the inside like the rest of her species, and tells them this is still preventable. Give them a lecture, give them hope, spur them into action. It’s what the Doctor would do.

* * *

What happens to a planet when its sun disappears?

She defines herself by negatives – she’s not the Daleks, she’s not the Cybermen – by what she circles or what circles her – she’s not the Master and she’s not the Timelords – by what she can’t touch.  
The outlines of the things that disgust her describe the boundaries of the space in which she is allowed to run. Don’t cross them or you won’t be the Doctor anymore. It’s a promise, she claims. (It’s a warning, she knows.)

If the Sun disappeared it would take eight minutes for the Earth to notice. Light and gravity travel at the speed of light, but only at the speed of light. Eight minutes is the time you get. Eight minutes is how long you have to wait. Eight minutes in orbit around a Sun that isn’t there anymore. Eight minutes orbiting a memory.

What happens to a planet when its sun disappears?

Essential to running away is the place you are leaving. The direction you know not to go, when you know nothing else. The mass at the centre of your orbit, determining your path. The place you are endlessly falling towards but never reach.

How long has she been circling a vanished sun?

* * *

She resents them for being around her and she resents them for leaving her alone. With their prying concern and loud curiosity. With her rattling memories and wriggling regret.

What is it about unspeakable knowledge that it wants to be spoken so badly? It fizzles beneath her skin, bubbling through cracked fissures, heating the accelerant in her stomach, making her flammable.

They tiptoe around her, feeling out the fault lines, dreading an eruption.

* * *

Feeling like a traitor, she remembers a girl. More than a thousand years ago. A girl so disarming she’d made the words fall right out of her mouth.

_My planet’s gone._

Just like that.

_Dead._

The words pressing against her lips, just like now. Wanting to be said, just like now. To be acknowledged in their horror. To have space made for them.

_It burnt like the earth. It’s just rocks and dust._

Just like now.

* * *

And she tries. Tries to say it. Tries to tell them because she has to tell _someone_. Someone needs to know. To listen. To hear her.

_My planet’s gone._

Just like that.

_Again._

But the words crumble like red sand in her hands at every ‘are you okay’ and ‘what’s wrong’ and ‘we’re here for you’. And all that comes out of her mouth is smoke. And they slink away, reluctant to press any harder.

* * *

Feeling like a hypocrite, she remembers a girl who didn’t take evasion for an answer. Who threatened to stay behind on a strange planet just to get a proper answer out of her. How easily she’d given in. Aching to tell someone, to describe home, to share. So glad to be given permission to indulge in memories dead in every mind but hers.

She’d been so young then. A font of bubbling feelings, wanting to wow and dazzle and amaze. Wanting to be admired, loved.

(Forgiven.)

She was so old now. So tired of starting from scratch, of letting them in, of becoming attached, of having them ripped away again. She didn’t have the energy anymore. She was a lot less fireworks now, a lot more simmer.

* * *

She can’t be touched. Keeps herself covered because her skin is burning with fire and anger both. Warily guards her space because the fuel in her stomach has crept up her throat and she can barely breathe without cinders burning her tongue. She knows her words will be scorching so she keeps her mouth shut.

She needs to be touched. By someone who understands, intrinsically. Who will reciprocate the instinctive telepathic connection. Who she doesn’t have to tailor herself for, explain herself to. Who knows her better than she knows herself. Around who being herself is as unavoidable as the fact that they will use that against her the next chance they get.

She touches a human and reaches out to their mind and gets empty silence in return and she is alone.

* * *

But she’s not alone. She’s got her Tardis. Who she keeps dragging back to burnt Gallifrey.

The Tardis fights her more forcefully every time. It doesn’t want to go there. _She_ doesn’t want to go there. But she still does.

On the eighteenth trip the Tardis sabotages her mid-flight and they crash on a small desolated planet somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy.

The Tardis kicks her out to vent the fumes coming off one of the blown motors and doesn’t let her back in.

She kicks and screams and when her voice gives out she walks away. From the Tardis, from herself, from feelings she can’t manage and memories she can’t ignore.

When the Tardis lets her back in to fix the motors, they can’t stop fighting. Unwelcome memories coming from both directions.

The Tardis locks her in rooms, raises the temperature to barely survivable, blasts loud music from everywhere. The Doctor viciously tries to disassemble her. They scream at each other a lot.

They’re being irrational, they’re being unreasonable, they’re being unfair to each other.

But there's no one else left to be unfair to.

It takes them three weeks to cooperate for long enough to fix the motors and get off the planet. She finds the fam where she left them. She’s only an hour late.

They berate her for it anyway. She blames the Tardis, who makes the flight hell in retaliation. When she finally manages to land, it’s in Sheffield and she kicks them out without even attempting an excuse and slumps against the console. They knock and the Tardis locks the door. She slides to the floor and hides under the console. The sounds of the Tardis echo her sobbing.

They knock on the door, ask to be let in. Into her Tardis and her life and her pain. She can’t. She’d hid from them her nature in an attempt to cut ties with it and now that her wish has been fulfilled and her home has been ripped brutally from the place in her chest where she didn’t realise it still took up so much space, she has no way to fill the hole, to even stop the bleeding coming out in gushes spurred by the beating of her two hearts.

* * *

Her grief is razorsharp and every motion cuts. Slicing through organs humans don’t have, leaking culture and customs and doctrine she’d thought she’d put away and forgotten about long ago. A constant throbbing in a four-beat pattern to the tune of nursery rhymes in a tongue she’s desperate, _desperate_ to hear. The yearning, the wanting, the longing, the homesickness, _the sickness_. It spills out of her through her eyes and mouth and hands. Through venomous stares and cruel words and furious movements. As though it might hurt less if she cuts someone else with the knives sticking out of her chest.

She leaves smears of messy feeling, broken history on everything she puts her hands on. Bleeds all over the Tardis, all over her friends. Mixing with Graham’s concern, Ryan’s empathy, Yaz’s hurt, it festers into a miasma hanging between them, permeating the air they share, promising to suffocate them all if she keeps this up.

She doesnt know how to stop.

* * *

She walks the Tardis reciting everything she's ever learnt by heart. Alphabet, lullabies, myths, fables, fairytales. Quick and stubborn, staying ahead of the panic snapping at her heels. The pressure in her chest builds as she nears the end of another poem and she walks faster, faster, find another, find another, this can’t have been the last one, there must be another, she must remember another, she must remember.

When there’s no one around to hear, she talks out loud in Gallifreyan. Needs the shape of the words in her mouth and the rhythm of the syllables in her ears. The panic when she forgets a word leaves her nauseous with a mouth full of ash that mangles the word when the Tardis provides it for her and she repeats, promising she still knows.

* * *

She’s not so much a candle burning on all sides as a world burning at all times. In every possible way. By her hands, by his hands, by their hands joined together, by the Timelords’ own hands and hubris.

She tries to contain it but the fury splits cracks through her surface as she dodges and evades and deflects and burns down to embers because she has no words except for the accelerant in her mouth and the kindling in her lungs and the sparks in her blood.

Swallow the fire. Be careful with the matches. Hold on a little longer. Keep them at a safe distance, and then maybe when the inferno of her own anger devours her, they won’t burn alongside.

**Author's Note:**

> gallifrey grief is fertile writing ground, what can i say
> 
> find me on tumblr: https://you-have-to-use-your-imagination.tumblr.com/  
> or youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKkql7b3UhUnU2EaL8afmIA?


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